New Year’s 2019 has come and gone, which means some poor souls had a massive amount of terribly soggy confetti to clean up in Times Square; and that U.S. News & World Report is out with rankings of the best diets for the upcoming year. My condolences to the confetti cleaners, happy New Year wishes to all, and now — let’s talk about those diets.

This year, as each for the past decade or so, I was privileged to serve as one of the judges. For 2019, there were 23 of us, and I must say — the company was quite illustrious. I am delighted to work alongside colleagues I greatly respect, and some very good friends in the mix as well.

The work we did, however, was entirely on our own. The process of ranking the 41 diets represented this year does not involve the expert panel convening and conferring, as it might. Those discussions would be interesting, and as in the movie “12 Angry Men,” would almost certainly shift miscellaneous rankings this way or that. But our process is more like a vote than a verdict.

You may well know the outcome of that vote already, since the diet rankings make an inevitable news splash. The news coverage this year has tended to highlight the identification of the Mediterranean diet as best “overall,” meaning for all health and weight goals and for the long term. The DASH diet held this spot for several recent years; last year, DASH and the Medi diet were tied.

I think my fellow U.S. News judges and I are potentially in the vanguard of a movement we hope will overtake our culture at large: enough with contrived, quick-fix diets predicated on cockamamie rules, elaborate theories and Draconian restrictions. The Mediterranean diet is not a “diet” at all but a lifestyle practice, rooted in culture and heritage, sustainable by whole populations across an expanse of not mere weeks — but lifetimes, and generations.

Nearly all of the diets that ranked well overall conformed to this theme of balanced, sensible, realistic and sustainable. The addition of a Nordic diet in the top 10 — representing a blend of traditional practices in that part of the world, with an infusion of modern science spanning the past half-century — reflects this consensus. All of the top-scoring diets also represented the same important theme of healthy eating, captured in the pithy insight of Michael Pollan: “food, not too much, mostly plants.”

What of the popular weight-loss diet du jour, the “ketogenic” diet? Well, yes, it ranked high for rapid weight loss. But before you rush out to try it accordingly — it came in spot 38 out of a total of 41 for overall health benefit. As I have pointed out to my patients over the years, a bout of cholera works extremely well for rapid weight loss; that doesn’t make it a good idea. Yes, you can lose weight with the severe restrictions of a keto diet — but you can lose weight you are far more likely to keep off, and find health, too, with any number of wholesome, balanced, sensible diets. The U.S. News rankings reflect the expert consensus on this matter.

If you want to know more about this year’s “best” diets, help yourself to the readily accessible details on the U.S. News site.

What would make this annual ritual even better? For some years, I have proposed to the U.S. News editors that they should explicitly ask us about each diet: how well would this work for everyone in a family? Healthy living is, and really should be, a family affair. I also think it would make the best diet rankings better to ask us: What is the environmental impact of this diet? With our climate and environment in dire peril, it is past time for us all to acknowledge that there are no healthy people on an uninhabitable planet; there are no good diets to choose from when aquifers dry out and crops fail. Diets are only truly “best” if best for people and planet alike. So, editors: Please ask us about that next time!

But let’s add a reality check here at the end. Where diet does the most to promote health and prevent disease; to add years to lives and life to years; and to do so sustainably — nobody is waiting for annual updates about what to eat. Where people eat the “best,” they do so because it is their cultural norm. It would be better than best if our culture renounced dieting and quick-fix nonsense and the predatory profiteering that mortgages the future health of our children. It would be better than best if eating well were not an annual news item but a cultural practice, all year long.